In the previous chapter, we explored the idea that your career can be one of the best ways to make a difference—and that it’s possible to find work that’s both meaningful to you and valuable to the world.
If that idea resonated, you might be wondering how to begin narrowing in. Where do your particular interests, skills, and motivations connect with opportunities to make a difference? What kinds of work might sit at that intersection?
It’s tempting to jump straight into specific job titles or focus narrowly on your passions in isolation. But a more fruitful place to start is by exploring both sides of the equation: what you bring to the table and where that might be most needed.
Starting with your strengths and interests
One way to begin is by looking inward: reflecting on the kinds of problems you’re drawn to, the skills you already have (or want to build), and the environments where you tend to do your best work. This sense of “fit” can be a powerful guide—not just for finding work you’ll enjoy, but for doing it well over time.
As you think about how you might contribute through your career, you might ask yourself:
- What are you good at? What skills come naturally to you, or what kind of work do you find fulfilling and challenging in a good way?
- What kind of problems capture your attention? When you hear about global issues, which ones do you find yourself wanting to learn more about or see real progress on?
- Are there groups of people, animals, or kinds of harm that you feel especially motivated to help address?
You don’t need perfect clarity on any of this right away, but exploring these questions helps clarify your side of the equation—what you bring and what you’re drawn to.
Finding opportunities for significant change
Now let’s look at the other side of the equation: the opportunities for impact in the world.
There’s no shortage of important problems, and many ways to work on them. But if you want your efforts to lead to real, lasting change, it helps to be strategic about where you focus.
Some problems are especially significant: they might affect large numbers of people or animals, involve intense or long-lasting harm, or be surprisingly overlooked despite their importance. When you focus on challenges like these, your time and energy can go much further.
This is one of the most important insights for doing impactful work: the key isn’t just to find something that sounds meaningful, but to look for places where your particular strengths and motivations can meet the world’s greatest needs.
The good news is that you don’t need to be a specific type of person or have a narrow set of skills to contribute.
It’s easy to feel like big problems require highly specialized expertise, like becoming a doctor for global health or a climate scientist for climate change. But the reality is that tackling complex global issues requires teams with a wide range of skills. Operations, policy, communications, research, management, design, advocacy, fundraising – these are all crucial functions needed to make progress. This means your unique strengths, whatever they are, can likely connect with an opportunity for real change.
Exploring high-impact areas
So, where are people putting this kind of thinking into practice? The examples below highlight just a few significant cause areas. They’re not the only places you can make a difference, but they offer a glimpse into what high-impact work can look like in practice — and how a wide range of roles and skill sets can contribute. As you read, you might notice certain problems that resonate, or spot a potential match between your own strengths and what’s needed.
Global health & wellbeing
At its core, global health & wellbeing is about making sure everyone (no matter where they live) has a fair chance at a healthy, stable, and fulfilling life. Work in this area typically focuses on improving conditions in lower-income countries, where access to basics like healthcare, clean water, and nutrition is often limited—and where economic challenges can make it even harder for people to thrive.
The scale of the need is huge. Around 2 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water—a basic resource that underpins almost everything else. And every year, millions of people—especially children—die from diseases that could be prevented with better access to healthcare, nutrition, and sanitation. But because these needs are so fundamental, progress here can be incredibly powerful. Targeted efforts can prevent illness, save lives, and open up opportunities on a massive scale. Immunization programs alone are estimated to prevent 3.5 to 5 million deaths each year!
Pursuing a career in global health & development can take many forms, all aimed at getting vital resources and support to those who need them. Take Bal Dhital. He began as a doctor, working directly with patients. Seeing the bigger picture of preventable illness led him to global health program management, where he could tackle root causes. His current role with the Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) addresses lead poisoning, a crisis impacting millions of children globally. His career shows how hands-on experience can fuel a desire to create wider systemic change for health.
If the idea of helping meet fundamental human needs resonates with you, there are many ways to make a meaningful contribution. You might work in civil service, shaping policies that affect health, education, or infrastructure. Or you could apply tools from development economics to evaluate which interventions are most effective. Some people focus on making nonprofits run smoothly—overseeing operations, logistics, or funding. Others specialize in monitoring and evaluation, helping ensure programs are actually improving lives. However you approach it, this is a space where thoughtful, well-executed work can go a long way.
Animal welfare
Animal welfare is about reducing unnecessary suffering and helping animals live better lives. While that includes companion animals, much of the focus is on the tens of billions of animals raised for food each year—most in factory farms, where they often endure extreme confinement, stress, and pain. The scale of suffering is enormous, and because it’s so often overlooked, this is a space where dedicated work can make a remarkably large difference.
If you’re interested in helping improve the lives of animals at scale, there are many ways to contribute. Jenna Reidi, for example, began working at an animal shelter, which gave her a firsthand understanding of animal needs. Later, she moved into strategic communications at Faunalytics, helping advocates use data to push for more effective change. Her path shows how hands-on experience can evolve into work that supports broader impact.
Others follow different routes: leading corporate campaigns to shift welfare standards, conducting journalistic investigations to expose poor conditions, advocating for stronger protections, or fundraising the resources needed to power this work. Some even help develop alternatives to animal products or improve practices in farming, labs, or shelters. And for those drawn to building something new, founding an organization can be another great path to tackling overlooked problems in the space.
Global catastrophic risks
The field of global catastrophic risks is about reducing the chances of events that could cause extreme, widespread harm, like future pandemics, nuclear war, or dangerous developments in technologies such as advanced AI or synthetic biology. These risks can feel abstract, but the stakes are very real. For example, COVID-19 tragically caused millions of deaths globally. Experts suggest that investing in stronger global preparedness beforehand could have saved countless lives, at a fraction of the immense economic cost of the pandemic itself.
Because the potential consequences are so large, even small steps to lower the risk can have an outsized impact. Take Jake Pencharz, who works at the UK’s AI Security Institute. With a research background in biosecurity, he studies how advanced AI could intersect with risks in areas like biology and chemistry and helps shape policies to reduce those dangers. It’s one example of how technical knowledge can feed directly into risk prevention.
But it’s far from the only path. If you work in policy or diplomacy, you might help develop international agreements around nuclear safety or AI. In public health or emergency response, you could strengthen systems that protect us from biological threats. In advocacy or communications, you could help build support for stronger safeguards. And if you’re drawn to operations or strategy, you could help run the organizations working on all of the above.
Other areas of impact
These are just a few examples of areas where the scale of the problem and the potential for progress create significant opportunities for impact, welcoming a wide variety of skills and approaches. Other major areas where your efforts could be highly valuable include:
- Mental health, where effective interventions could reduce suffering for millions
- Climate change, which threatens communities and ecosystems across the globe
- Broad societal improvements, where strengthening systems or improving governance creates the foundations for large-scale change.
If you’re not sure which area to focus on just yet, you’re in good company—most people don’t start with a clear answer.
Part of the process is simply getting familiar with what’s out there and seeing where your interests and skills might align with significant opportunities for positive change.
Some people take a more analytical approach—diving into philosophical frameworks to prioritize between problems. Others focus more on what feels practical and solvable with their current or potential skillset, or actively decide to explore various causes. Whatever suits you, it’s helpful to have a basic understanding of promising areas and focus on finding where your motivation, skills, and values intersect with opportunities to make a real difference.
Making sense of your options: A framework for strategic thinking
At this point, you might have some initial ideas about what to work on, but how do you start to weigh these different possibilities and make more intentional choices? To help you assess potential career paths or even specific types of roles more strategically, we find it helpful to use the SELF framework, which has four key factors.
S – Significance of the problem
You’ve already started thinking about problem significance, which is about the scale of the issue: how many lives does it touch, how deeply does it affect them, and what’s at stake if it’s not addressed? A role tackling a larger and more urgent problem often offers a greater potential for impact.
Consider two people working on climate change. One is focused on local air quality, working to reduce pollution in a specific city or neighborhood. While this is a valuable effort, the problem, in this case, is more confined—primarily affecting local residents and their immediate environment. In contrast, another person is focused on tackling the larger issue of global carbon emissions, which are driving climate change and impacting ecosystems worldwide. This problem affects every part of the planet: vulnerable coastal communities, fragile ecosystems, and even the long-term habitability of the planet. The stakes are incredibly high, with far-reaching consequences for the entire global population and the future of life.
This isn’t to say that focused, local work isn’t important. But taking a broader view and asking, “What’s the overall scale of the problem I could contribute to solving?” can help you identify opportunities where your efforts might lead to much more substantial positive change.
E – Efficacy of the solution
Efficacy is about understanding how well a particular solution or approach actually works to address a problem and achieve its goals. Two people can be working on the same issue, but their chosen methods can lead to very different levels of success.
Say you’re passionate about global health. One option might be supporting a program that builds new clinics. Another might be fundraising for the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria. Both aim to improve health in low-income countries—but there’s strong evidence that bed net programs prevent large numbers of deaths at an extremely low cost, while the impact of new clinics can vary widely. The difference isn’t just theoretical. It can mean saving ten times—or a hundred times—as many lives per dollar or per hour of work.
Considering efficacy encourages you to look beyond good intentions. It’s about asking what actually works—based on evidence and outcomes—and focusing your efforts where they can do the most good. In practice, this often also means looking for somewhat neglected problems, where work isn’t hitting the point of significantly diminishing returns, so your individual contribution can make more of a difference.
L – Leverage of the role
Even within the same organization or cause, different roles open up different kinds of influence. Leverage is about how much scope a role gives you to contribute meaningfully. This might mean shaping high-level decisions, building tools that others rely on, or scaling what works. Sometimes it means gaining skills now that will unlock even more impactful roles in the future. Either way, it’s about asking: “How much does this role allow me to do?”
As you think about leverage, it’s worth considering your counterfactual impact, which reflects what would happen if you didn’t take a role. This could lead you, for example, to focus on roles where you have a unique comparative advantage—like a special skill or strength that you have that few others do. Even if this advantage doesn’t revolve around what you’re best suited for in absolute terms, it might still be worth focusing on it if it’s something important that you’re much better at relative to other people.
F- Fit for you
How well does a potential path align with your unique mix of skills, experiences, motivations, and working style? A strong fit means you’re more likely to be energized, effective, and able to sustain your contribution in the long run, making your work more impactful and fulfilling.
Consider the example of two roles in a non-profit: a communications associate and a fundraiser. Both need good writing, but one might suit someone energized by public messaging, while the other better fits someone comfortable with direct requests and persistent follow-up. Choosing the role that better aligns with your deeper traits can lead to greater long-term effectiveness.
Using the framework
The SELF framework isn’t about finding a “perfect 10” in every category or getting bogged down in precise scoring. Instead, you should view it as a lens to compare different directions. They can help you compare options more thoughtfully, surface trade-offs, and see where a path that looks less “prestigious” or conventional might actually lead to deeper impact.
Moving forward
The most meaningful and effective careers often emerge at the intersection of several things: the world’s biggest needs, solutions that actually work, roles that allow you to contribute meaningfully, and your own personal fit. Rarely is this alignment obvious from the outset. And for most people, it’s not about making one perfect decision—it’s about a series of informed, thoughtful steps.
You might try something that works well or something that teaches you what to try next. You might move closer to your ideal fit over time. What matters most is that you keep learning and adjusting with curiosity and direction, not perfection.
With these ideas in mind, you can start getting a clearer sense of what directions feel most promising—and where it might be worth exploring further. Next, we’ll look at how to map out those early hypotheses and test them in the real world.